Literature as Self-Defense: An Interview with James Lasdun

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James Lasdun’s new book, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, is a memoir about an experience that is in fact still ongoing. In 2003, he taught a course in creative writing at a college in New York. His most gifted student was an Iranian-born woman in her early 30s, who was writing a novel based on her family’s experiences living in Iran under the shah. In 2005, the woman – whom he calls “Nasreen” – emailed Lasdun to announce that she had finished a draft of her book; although he was too busy to read it at the time, he was confident enough in her talent to recommend her to his agent. They emailed back and forth, and an online friendship began to develop. Nasreen’s correspondence began to intensify, however – to become stranger and more aggressively seductive – and so Lasdun, a happily married man, ceased to respond. The book is an exploration of the effects of this relationship turning sour, as Nasreen continued to hound him online, her emails becoming increasingly hate-filled and anti-Semitic. A major aspect of her psychological guerrilla warfare involved direct attacks on his reputation, accusing him online (in Wikipedia entries, Amazon reviews, in comment sections of his articles) of sexual harassment and plagiarism. Give Me Everything You Have is a harrowing account of what it’s like to have someone expend a great deal of time and energy on the project of damaging your life for no immediately obvious reason. It’s also a beautifully written and digressively essayistic exploration of anti-Semitism, travel, literature, and the mysteriously ramifying effects people have on each other.

The Millions: The thing I was most impressed by in the book is the way you read this situation, this awful ongoing situation of being stalked and harassed, from a variety of conceptual viewpoints. In particular, the way in which you arrange this reading around a cluster of literary texts – TinTin, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Plath’s poetry and so on. Was this something you intended to do from the beginning, or did it just sort of come about as you worked your way into the subject?

James Lasdun: I didn’t plan very much, partly because the book didn’t exactly begin its life as a book. It began as an attempt to write a sort of neutral document that I would be able to post somewhere in my defense. It began as a strange sort of personal necessity. And then in the course of doing that I began to see that it wasn’t going to work in that way, because it kept looking as if it was written by a crazy person. But then, I began to feel that there was a more interesting thing to be written. And I just sort of plunged into it and wrote it without plotting and planning. I think I felt quite early on that I would be wanting to pursue some ideas that would enlarge the resonance in some way, and one of those directions was going to be through some things I had read that were very close to me. I think anyone who writes and reads always keeps a few texts in their heads through which they read the world, and read what’s happening to them. Gawain has always been something that I’ve had in my mind, and I knew that I was going to be writing about a particular kind of psychological combat, and that I might be able to find a way of telling my story through that story. And I started doing that and found it kind of interesting to do. From there, other literary interests of mine began to cohere around it.

TM: Let me just return to what you said about the book starting out as a document of self-defense. That’s a very fascinating beginning for a literary work to have.

JL: Yeah. At a certain point I felt I was going to need to create this kind of document, because she was contacting employers, and people were coming to me and saying “what the hell is this all about?” And it’s such a bizarre story, and such a kind of uncomfortable one to have to tell people, that I felt that if I set it down and posted it on my website, then I could direct people to it. It turns out to be very difficult to write a sort of defense of yourself for general consumption when in general people aren’t accusing you of anything. So if you present them with a defense of yourself, it already looks like you’re nuts. When I first tried to get the police involved, I could tell that they just weren’t convinced, that they just thought I was crazy. But I felt that it had become incredibly damaging to me, and it had accumulated over time, with her writing to my boss and things like that. I felt very, very vulnerable, and very much in need of this kind of document. But it turned out that I just couldn’t write it in that way. And another part of it was that I was completely unable to write anything else, because this situation was just absolutely consuming me. It doesn’t anymore to that extent, even though it’s somewhat ongoing, but it did for a long period. To the point where I couldn’t write anything else. So I thought I might as well go at it.

TM: So in a sense you had to write this book in order to clear a path for other subjects?

JL: Well, yes, in way. But really, I wasn’t even thinking about moving on. Literally all I could think about was the situation I was in. It really had absolutely invaded my consciousness. And that in a way, the way it took over my head, was almost as bad as the sense of damage that I felt was going on in the outside world. I’d never experienced these things that you hear about, with people who suffer from post-traumatic stress, where you actually can’t control your thoughts in any way at all, and you can’t stop yourself from thinking about something. I just became very obsessive, in a way that I’m not usually by temperament. And I did find when I started writing about it that I was very quickly improving on that front, that I was able to feel less consumed by it, just in normal daily life. But I don’t even know what I was thinking at the beginning, as to whether this book would be even publishable, or whether I would want to publish it. Initially just to write was what interested me. It wasn’t something that I told my publishers I was doing, or asked them for an advance or a contract or anything like that. I just wrote it. I wrote a draft quite quickly, a much longer draft than what was eventually published. And I just cut and cut and sort of found what I felt was a book that would express what I wanted to express, but also mean something to other people. I mean, it was all very private stuff, very personal, and so there was a question of how interested other people are going to be in your own problems. And I wanted it to have a balance of telling the story as it was – because I do think it’s inherently dramatic, and so weird. I knew that that would be the spine of it. But I felt that it also needed to be as resonant as it could be, and that seemed to lead me to write about all kinds of things that interested me. Literary texts, but also political things, cultural things, personal experience, memory, travel and things like that. I’d never written any extended non-fiction before, and never thought of myself as that kind of writer, but I found that I’ve enjoyed doing it. If “enjoy” is an appropriate word to use there. It’s opened up possibilities in terms of how to write.

TM: I was wondering whether you thought about turning this material into fiction. Because it struck me while I was reading that, as a novel, it would be much more problematic. That this material would seem much more ethically dicey if it were presented in the form of fiction.

JL: Well, as a fiction writer, I was always going to be turning that over in my mind. And some of the fiction I was working on, or trying to work on, was headed in the direction of being a fictionalized version of what was going on. But as you say, it was all wrong. It wasn’t the right way of dealing with it. Also I was still in the thick of the experience. This isn’t a book that comes out of emotion recollected in tranquility or anything like that. This was written right from the thick of the experience, which is a rather strange thing to be doing. And I realized pretty early on that it had to be absolutely truthful. And one of the things that I was aware of was that it might be impossible to publish because of that. And I knew that what I produced, that no publisher would publish it without having it okayed by their legal department.

TM: And you must, throughout the process, have had misgivings, in terms of whether publishing it would exacerbate the situation. This must have been a troubling question for you.

JL: Yes, well the question of whether it would exacerbate the situation – I felt that the situation could not get any worse. I mean, I’d been threatened with death; she was basically threatening to kill me, threatening my children, and I didn’t know how much worse it could get than that. When someone does that, they’ve pushed things as far as they can go. So I felt at that point that the more public I could make this, the safer I would be in fact. I suppose there were times in between my having finished and it coming out, where she’d gone relatively quiet. She does go quiet for periods. And I would sort of think, well, why am I risking stirring up another round of this unpleasantness. And then suddenly out of the blue she would start up again, more violent and more terrifying than ever. And I would think, well, I’m glad I am doing it, because I need to do it. So that’s really where I’m at. You know, it is ongoing, and she has become even worse and now the whole matter has entered a new chapter. It’s in the hands of the hate crimes unit of the NYPD. They’re still not able to do all that much about it, but she has been visited by cops. She’s sort of graduated to phone stuff. So in terms of whether of it would exacerbate the situation, my feeling was it was already as bad as it could be. Being threatened is… I’ve never been threatened before, and it is so deeply unpleasant. You so want to do something about it.

TM: Were you troubled by issues around the ethics of writing about this topic in the first place?

JL: I talk about this a little bit in the book. I’ve never seen a book that’s quite like it, in terms of being about a real situation, with real people, that has not yet resolved itself, and that involves using emails. The book wouldn’t have worked unless I could use the emails verbatim, and I deliberately didn’t find out whether that would be okay or not until I finished the book, because I didn’t want to do a book that couldn’t use the emails, and if it turned out that wasn’t going to be possible, then I was resigned that I just wouldn’t publish the book. I don’t feel personally ethically compromised in any way at all. Partly because this is not an attack on her. I’m not pursuing any kind of vendetta; in fact I bend over backwards to try to understand the situation from her point of view. I acknowledge that she was someone who really interested me. I really admired her writing, and wanted to encourage her. I liked her. I was interested in being in touch with her, and all the rest of it. It’s not in any way me attacking her. Her words are very damning, but those are her words.

TM: I should say that, from a reader’s perspective, it’s very clear how concerned you are with being as evenhanded and unsensational as possible in trying to come to some understanding of why this person is tormenting you in this way. In fact, one of the things I found most interesting about the book is the fact that at its center are two novelists who are, in different ways, trying to create each other as characters. “Nasreen” is very much trying to shape you into a sinister, exploitative figure in the public eye, and you’re trying to understand her actions, to make her make sense as a character. If the book were fiction, this would be a very clever and perhaps excessively convoluted metafictional conceit.

JL: I think that’s a very good description of it. It’s a story about two fiction writers trying to understand each other, and creating characters out of each other. And one of the main themes of it is the idea of what we are in other peoples’ minds, the constructs people make of each other. What I made of her, what she made of me. And that just seemed to be so much a theme of the whole thing, and the question of reputation is very bound up in that. That’s another sort of layer of one’s identity, and it’s one that can’t really be controlled; it’s in the hands of other people. And yet it is oneself. But it has become weirdly vulnerable again, I think, in the age of the internet. But yes, I think you’re right. And again that would have made it impossibly slippery for treatment in a work of fiction.

TM: For me the question that the book turns on is the question of why this is happening at all. And you allude at a few points to this almost Shakespearean question of motiveless malice. Do you feel that you got closer to answering that, or is it still a mystery?

JL: That was a big question that I was exploring, and I didn’t expect to come up with a simple answer. But in the process of that exploration, I had to deal with the question of what I might have brought to the experience. Because when something this extreme and prolonged happens to you, rightly or wrongly the mind looks for reasons. It’s very hard to believe it’s just a random occurrence, something that goes on for this long and so takes over your life, you just instinctively try to understand it in the context of your whole life. And so I was interested in analyzing my own role in it to the extent that I felt that I had one. And one of the things that I came up with that I hadn’t really thought about until I started writing about it was the effect of my silence on her. For me, that had just been what I needed to do, was stop answering her emails. I didn’t make the decision that I was going to stop answering her forever. It just sort of became impossible to start writing back again, because once they started getting obsessive they never let up, and then they turned to hate mail and then there was no question of responding. But I only ever experienced that one-sidedly, in the sense that I just wasn’t answering; I wasn’t thinking about the effect of my not answering. I wasn’t thinking about the effects of silence on someone who is obsessed with you, and with whom you have been in contact. So I was sort of interested in that. And I tried to approach the question of her motive from various different angles, but it could only ever be conjectural and speculative. I didn’t really have much of a model for this book, but to some extent I think Freud’s case histories and his analyses of historic figures like Leonardo and Moses were the closest thing to a literary model for me. You look at an experience, you try to kind of take account of every single detail that you can recall, and you look at it and feel your way into it, and test it for all sorts of associations, whatever resonances you can draw out of it, and you build your document like that. So that was another tack that I took. But you’re right, in the end I don’t supply any explanation. And obviously there’s the whole question of mental illness, and to what extent that answers it. And personally… Well, I don’t know. You know, I can’t pretend to be able to psychiatrically diagnose someone.

TM: Right, yes. And I think what’s most unsettling about the book is this sense that there is no explanation. The book makes it clear that really all that’s necessary for someone to make your life a misery is for them to want that badly enough. That’s all that’s needed. The Internet facilitates this, makes it so much more viable a possibility. And that’s frightening, the idea that all that’s needed is the will.

JL: Yeah, the will and the Internet. That’s a pretty deadly combination. But I mean, there’s mystery that’s total, and there’s mystery that’s informed by whatever little light one can bring to bear on it. And I hope by the end the book, the sense of unanswerable mystery is somewhat enriched or informed by these other things. But it is, ultimately, unanswerable.

The hero of David Bezmozgis’s first book, Natasha(2004), a slim collection of short stories, was a young Latvian Jewish immigrant growing up in 1980s Toronto. Bezmozgis’s precise prose, inflected with a twice-removed shtetl comedy, played in the same keys as Malamud and Babel, though his subject was born well into the rock and roll era. Some could read his book as part of the hipster canon, but it maintained in style and substance an Old World sensibility. His new book, a humane, honest first novel, The Free World, starts a couple of years before the opening pages of Natasha, to tell a more expansive tale from one of the more recent and less commemorated Jewish migrations. In 1978, three generations of the Krasansky family leave Riga to find themselves in Rome, which serves here as a kind of hot, stifling refugee purgatory. They scramble to make life bearable while searching for passage to a new home somewhere in the West. Their own recent pasts in the Soviet state are hardly past. Samuil, the patriarch, is a die-hard communist who has left the Party in disgrace. His son Alec is a sexually-frustrated child of the Khrushchev thaw.
Bezmozgis’s own family migrated from Riga to Toronto when he was six. He’s 38 now and still lives in Toronto, with his wife and two young daughters. We met at the Fair Grounds Coffee Shop in Iowa City on May 2, where he was representing Canada on a PEN World Voices Festival Tour. It was the second time we had spoken – I had interviewed him about Natasha in 2006 – though the first time we met in person. The following is a pared-down version of our conversation.
The Millions: In reading your portraits of Riga in the ’70s and Rome in the ’70s, I felt I was reading portraits painted in similar colors. Maybe it’s because we always imagine things very internally. We may be here in Iowa City but your voice may not be all that different when you describe your time here from when you describe your time in Riga, Italy or Toronto.
David Bezmozgis I think, more than that, it’s a tonal thing. Which is to say that the tone of life for Alec, let’s say, or Karl, [his brother] and [his wife] Polina…weren’t that dark or depressing [in Riga]. They were young…It was the most Westernized part of the Soviet Union. They went to coffee houses. They could go to the theater. And that was actually part of what I hoped to convey in the book, which is that certain preconceptions about how drab and gray the Soviet Union was in the ’70s aren’t exactly true. Particularly for people who were young and educated, life wasn’t that dismal. And I think by the time they get to Rome, they’re still the same people.
TM: Samuil’s past is so unrelentingly grim to me, from the 1920s to World War II. But there is a kind of humanity that is always pulling you through. He and his family are caught between Stalin and Hitler, and there’s really no place where they can go.
DB: Right, but they don’t consider themselves caught between Stalin and Hitler.
TM: But that’s part of the terror of the moment. They don’t realize what’s involved with Stalin, which leads Samuil to betray his cousin. He’s part of a system that he doesn’t quite recognize as being pretty awful.
DB: True, but…for somebody like Samuil, Stalin is salvation. And even though there is that betrayal of his cousin, it’s not so much Stalin, it’s communism. Stalin didn’t force him to do it. It’s this revolutionary idea [that goes] back to Lenin. He’s caught between the tsar. He’s caught between capitalism. Even before Hitler, before fascism, these are proletariats. These are words that we don’t use anymore…He finds that he suffers from the system, the capitalist system.
TM: But isn’t he forced into a constant rationalization?
DB: I think that it’s only rationalization if you don’t believe in it. When you talk about people who truly believe in God, and they encounter atheists, they don’t think of God from the perspective of the atheists. They think of God from their perspective. So I think that for Samuil, it’s not like he has in his mind some dissident mentality that he’s constantly arguing with. He has a different mentality, that every now and then he feels incursions into, but I think, for him, he’s not quite as conflicted as you and I would think he should be.
TM: So he’s constantly worshipping a god that he doesn’t realize has failed that everyone around him realizes has.
DB: Not everyone, but a lot. He still believes it is the better alternative. He truly believes it…
He believes he deserved to be kicked out of the party. Had he disciplined his children better, had he been a better father to them, in the true ideological sense, they wouldn’t have betrayed him. He feels himself to be implicated.
TM: So, to extend the metaphor, he becomes the Christian who must believe he is going to hell, otherwise his entire system of belief falls down upon him.
DB: Right, as with any orthodox believer. You don’t pick and choose from your religion. You understand that these are the tenets of the faith. And you don’t pick and choose what is convenient to you.
TM: So he’s a Dostoevskyan character, except he isn’t wrestling with a fundamentalist conception of God. He’s wrestling with a fundamentalist conception of communist ideology.
DB: I suppose. I wasn’t thinking in those terms. I was thinking in real terms of what I knew people of that generation to be like…I found a book, mostly transcripts, of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Trial, Stalin’s trial, the secret trial. There was this man named Solomon Lozovsky. He said, This is illegal what you’re doing to me. You have proven nothing. I am a good communist. Despite what you’re saying, you are the ones who are the criminals here. You are the ones who are distorting communism. I am the one who stands for the communist ideal. And if I am mistaken, kill me. If I am not mistaken, after you’ve killed me, rehabilitate me.
He cares about his legacy in ideological terms. He would accept death as a revolutionary. The way he approaches it is that death is not a problem for the individual. He’s part of a larger, historical and political force. If you’re going to kill me as an individual, kill me if I’m wrong. But if you discover later that you're mistaken, you have to rehabilitate me.
TM: People forget that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn actually has a sense of humor. There’s a touch of humor that pokes through Cancer Ward. There’s a touch of humor that pokes through One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, as well. The characters are in this awful, bleak, cannibalistic atmosphere and they’re telling jokes about it. Alec and his brother Karl’s generation reminded me more of the characters in Milan Kundera’sThe Joke. That’s a book filled with low-key humor. So were you thinking of this humor tradition of writers from communist countries when you sat down to write this book. I ask this because when we talked five years ago, you spoke of a tradition of Jewish humor that you were drinking from when you wrote the stories in Natasha. I was curious if you were looking at this other tradition when you were writing The Free World.
DB: I think, first of all, I’m the same writer. So writers have sensibilities and points-of-view. And I think I’m the writer that I am because of where I come from. So I’d be surprised if the tone of any of my work was ever greatly different than Natasha or anything else. It’s a worldview. It’s a way of looking at the world. And as far as being part of a tradition, of bringing Jewish humor into the work, it’s there because it reflects the experience of the people I know. And it’s there because that’s the nature of Soviet life and Soviet Jewish life. So it ends up in the book, inevitably.
I think the parts of Solzhenitsyn that are funny aren’t there because he artificially introduced them. They’re there because he’s trying to authentically replicate what life was like. And I’m trying to do the same.
As far as Kundera and that generation of people, like Alec and Karl, who came of age in the Khrushchev thaw, this communism thing is a joke by then. You couldn’t take it seriously, unless you were some kind of robot. And so if you can’t take it seriously, but you’re forced to live under it, you have no choice but to deride it, to make fun of it. Because they’re not stupid. So what are they supposed to do? They can’t leave. They can’t protest. So you live. You wink here. You nudge there. You make a joke there. Because it’s bizarre.
You know there’s humor in the Samuil [flashback scenes which cover the pogroms, the inter-war period and World War II], between him and his brother. Because it’s true. Jews are funny. Because they’ve been forced to be funny. Because when you’re powerless and you can’t change anything and you’re not stupid, you have to make light of it in order to go on.
TM: So it’s a coincidence that you have taken on a tone similar to these other writers?
DB: It’s a coincidence, I guess. It has something to do with each individual sensibility. Kundera is not the same writer as Solzhenitsyn. Some people are funnier than others. So it has something to do with my own sensibility, my own peculiar humor, which is different than other writers’ humor. You can think of other Soviet writers and you can think of other post-Soviet writers. Gary Shteyngart writes differently. So it has something to do with how you’re wired. But it also has something to do with the world you’re writing about.
TM: There’s an anxiety a lot of writers feel about writing about the Holocaust. “What right do I have to say anything about the Holocaust?” Or “What right do I have to say anything about Stalinism?” I interviewed Cynthia Ozick years ago and despite the fact that she is the author of The Shawlshe didn’t feel anyone who was not a survivor should use the Holocaust in a work of fiction. Because there is still so much that has been recorded that we still haven’t read yet. And, her argument went, we should be sitting down and reading these records or any kind of testimony that exists. That’s what we should be spending our time doing, not trying to weave stories or entertainments out of the history of the Holocaust. This was her claim. Did you have any of those anxieties or concerns when you sat down to write The Free World?
DB: Only to the extent that when there was actual violence, and there isn’t a lot of firsthand violence in the book. There is one incident when Samuil’s father and grandfather are killed. If you’re not a firsthand witness to these things then to write a firsthand account of how it happens…I think I would say I share Cynthia Ozick’s concerns about that. That’s why there isn’t a lot of violence in the book. But there’s a lot of the events that lead up to those moments and the events that follow on the heels of those moments. So [I do the scene] when Samuil and his brother want their mother to leave to evacuate Riga. But I certainly don’t do the scene which they can’t see of how their mother, their aunt, their uncle [and] their cousins are murdered by the Nazis because they’re gone by then.
[I]t’s true what Cynthia Ozick says about the Holocaust. What North Americans know of as the Holocaust is what happened in Poland and parts West. They have a far more vague understanding - if any understanding at all - of what happened east of Poland. So in that respect, I didn’t feel I was participating in some kind of redundancy. But rather, that I was rendering for primarily a Western audience stuff that is not that well known from the Soviet Union, though certainly better known now after the collapse of the Soviet state, as it was quite hidden even during the Soviet period.
TM: You are essentially saying that you are writing about the events that lead up to the fact, and then the experience, the memory, the trauma of what passed. I have my traumas. You have your traumas. Everyone has his traumas. But most of us do not have an experience on the level of the Holocaust. So when you try to get inside the head of Samuil - the way the synapses of his mind move between the past and the present - do you, as a novelist, find yourself grafting your own experience of what it’s like when bad memories from 30 years ago hit you at a completely different time and place in a strange way?
DB: Inevitably. You can’t think but with your own mind. But because I did so much research and read the autobiographies and the testimonials and the court transcripts of people of that generation, I also understood the difference to some degree of how those people thought when they crossed certain experiences. And so it was a combination of, yes, there is something universal about experiencing trauma. Then there’s also something contextual ideologically. You’re socialized in a certain way. You’re politicized in a way. You think differently. So it was a combination of those two things. So a reader would be able to identify mostly how Samuil feels, how he experiences loss, and even happiness. And also at the same time I think [he would] be struck by the places where his mentality diverges from what you and I would consider as typical or conventional ways of thinking and processing these things. There’s a revolutionary mentality which we don’t have, because most people in North America aren’t wedded to a revolutionary ideal. They’re wedded to their family or themselves.
TM: Did you grow to love Latvia more as you wrote this book?
DB: I don’t think I grew to love Latvia more.
TM: Did you develop any kind of affection for it?
DB: I developed a deeper sense of melancholy about what history had wrought. My family’s roots go back multiple generations. I guess the feeling is that I regret what happened to Latvia. I regret where the country is now. I regret that there’s effectively very little Jewish communal life there. And it just seems sad to me…
My grandfather spoke Yiddish and he lived in a certain type of Latvia where he was raised in a traditional Jewish way. My parents no longer spoke Yiddish though they understood it. They spoke Russian. And their culture was Soviet culture. And here I am now where my language is English. And my experience is a Western capitalist experience. And I think it’s sad. I think it’s unnatural when I look at Americans who have been living here for 150 years, 200 years.
We’re in Iowa now. “My great-grandmother’s house was here in Iowa. I have continued to live in this house or somewhere nearby. If you want to read great-grandma’s letters, well they’re written in the same language you speak now.” Culturally, the frame of reference is basically the same. You believe in the same god she believed in. But it’s not my case. The language my grandfather expressed himself most intimately in is a language I don’t speak. The language my parents expressed themselves most intimately in is a language my children won’t speak. So when you look back over generations it’s this alienation from generation to generation to generation. For my daughters – I have two of them now – my grandparents will seem so alien to them, which is so sad to me. And even my parents will seem alien to them, which is equally sad to me.

A little more than 10 years ago I was an MFA student finishing my thesis, a collection of short stories that I had no intention of publishing. I wanted to be a novelist; the stories, I figured, were teaching me how I might do that. After I graduated, I started a book. Between SAT tutoring jobs, bookstore and cheese store shifts, and teaching my own workshops, I would sit down to write -- and also panic. I thought, I have no idea what I'm doing! It was true, I didn't; as anyone who's written both knows, novels and short stories are very different beasts. At these moments, I would hear the voice of my former thesis advisor Margot Livesey in my head. In her sweet Scottish lilt, she'd urge me forward. She was (and is) an author I admire, and I wanted to make her proud. In this way, I put one sentence down, then another and another.
Livesey isn't a preachy teacher. She doesn't have little slogans or rules; she isn't the type to ban certain points of view from her classes, or tell you that dead grandmothers are a tired trope. Her treatment of fiction and writing is open-minded and deep, and she considers and critiques a manuscript both on its own terms and against a long tradition of fiction. She is encouraging, and yet her expectations are high. As with the best teachers, she invited me to be the writer I wanted to be, while also pushing me to be better than that.
She is also one of the most talented novelists working today. Her gift, in particular, for writing complicated characters is what inspires me most. Through her fiction, she continues to be my teacher. Livesey's new novel, Mercury, is a kind of morality tale, but without an easy sense of right and wrong. It's also a literary thriller, about a husband and wife and the secrets they keep from one another, and the ways in which they fail to see each other truthfully. It's got an eye doctor, a beautiful and powerful horse, an African Grey parrot named Nabokov, and a gun, which does, of course, go off.
Livesey was kind enough to answer some questions via email about teaching, reading, and writing her excellent books.
The Millions: You spend the fall in Iowa City, teaching graduate writing students at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. In the spring you're in Boston. Can you talk about how writing (and perhaps reading) changes for you, depending on whether or not you're teaching? How has teaching influenced you as a writer, and, conversely, how has your writing influenced you as a teacher?
Margot Livesey: Teaching every autumn, I find myself plunged into the varied worlds that my students are creating, and at the same time rereading the stories and novels I’ve assigned for my classes. Both I think, I hope, influence my work. I do reread quite often but rereading with a class in mind, trying to figure out an author’s decisions, forces me to think more deeply, and more critically, about works I already admire and that’s nearly always fruitful. Maybe I can imitate how Jhumpa Lahiri manages her shifts in point of view in The Namesake. Or steal something from William Maxwell’s use of journalistic techniques in So Long, See You Tomorrow.
Meanwhile my students offer me maps of the contemporary world, constantly under revision as we debate voice, character, and motivation. In our workshops I get to study those maps in detail and to see how very good readers are responding to fiction. I cherish their voices in my head when I’m teaching and they remain, perched on my shoulder as it were, when I’m not -- avoid that cliche, think about the setting, do you need to mention politics, is the animal too symbolical, is the dialogue going deep enough, can the mother have a more interesting job?
My own writing has made me very aware that there are some things I need to write to advance a novel or a story which the reader absolutely does not need to read. I tell my students a good first chapter is a chapter that helps the author to write the rest of the novel. Of course, later, the first chapter also needs to be a good ambassador but being too critical, too early, can sometimes distract the writer from what she really needs to do.
TM: Are there any themes or styles that are popular with your students right now? Which writers are inspiring and influencing them?
ML: A number of my students are dealing with material that engages with race, class, and gender in interesting ways. They cherish the work of such writers as Junot Díaz , Edward P. Jones, Toni Morrison, and Zadie Smith. Others are interested in the work of Jonathan Franzen, the sweeping panorama of social concerns, or in grittier voices like Bonnie Jo Campbell and of course Raymond Carver. Still others are working on historical material or using texts within texts. Rather than a single popular theme or style I would say there’s a wonderful range of themes, forms, and subject matters being explored.
TM: Your husband is a painter. Can you talk about how his work with a visual artist informs your process? Do you talk to each other about your work?
ML: Eric paints large abstract oil paintings. He works in layers on seven or eight paintings at once and many of his paintings take well over a year to complete. I don’t know if he’d agree but I think of his work as having a novelistic quality; the colors and composition gradually come into focus. We do spend a lot of time talking about our processes although I am often not very forthcoming when I’m in the midst of a new novel. Happily when I have nothing to say we can fall back on talking about our reading, a passion we share.
TM: At a recent event you told the audience that you write on a computer without the Internet, and said this was essential to your process. Can you talk more about this? I also can't stop thinking about how you said that sometimes you read the dictionary during your writing time. I hope this is true! If so, what dictionary are you reading, and what recent gems have you come upon?
MG: Research is often a crucial part of my novel writing but it can also be very distracting. And then of course I can so easily fall into checking email. For a while I did try to be disciplined, but more recently I’ve solved the problem by having two computers, one on which I write fiction and essays, and a second one, a laptop, on which I do my correspondence and go online. Sometimes I go back and forth between the two 20 times in a few hours but I still think that this is better for my concentration and my efficiency.
I used to read poems or stories when I was stuck, but too often I was fatally seduced. Now I have a shorter Oxford English Dictionary in which I browse, sometimes purposefully, sometimes randomly, as I try to think what to write next. I often treat it as a kind of I Ching, simply opening it at random. I love knowing where words come from -- disaster -- ruin of the stars -- and seeing the examples of usage: “Disaster always brought out the best in Churchill."
TM: So much of your work is about morality and Mercury in particular is about life's murky gray areas, when it's not always quite clear what is right and what is wrong. Can you talk a little bit about how morality and making-hard-choices informs the characters you write, and the stories you tell. Your Iowa colleague, and another former teacher of mine, Ethan Canin, used to say in class that fiction writers are "moral philosophers." Would you agree, and why or why not?
ML: I do agree with Ethan, but I would also paraphrase John Updike’s comment: The novel is our greatest psychological experiment. I am very interested in what people will do given certain possibilities. And I am very interested in how we are often quite confident in analyzing other people, but surprisingly reluctant to analyze ourselves. I think the best characters in novels combine that confidence with a sense of appropriate mystery and I think it is the job of plot, or conflict, to let us look more deeply into that mystery.
I am still a little surprised by how deeply interested I am in moral choices. Clearly I was paying more attention in my Scottish Sunday school than I realized. I remain deeply puzzled -- I’d have to say indignant -- that as adults we can find ourselves in situations where there is no obvious right thing to do.
TM: A few friends of mine, all of them women, have taken up or returned to horseback riding lately, and with your book and Mary Gaitskill'sThe Mare, it seems that horses are...trending! What drew you to write about horses in Mercury?
ML: I think horses, and our relationships with them, are fascinating. I knew when I started Mercury that I wanted to write about an ambitious woman and I knew that I wanted the object of that ambition to be something that many people, but by no means everyone, would value. A horse seemed perfect: large, complicated, fragile. I haven’t ridden much as an adult, but I did as a teenager and I felt I knew what it was like to inhabit that passion. Riding around Boston turned out to be very different from riding the Scottish Highland ponies of my youth. I loved visiting the stables and observing various horses and riders. And I loved reading books about horses including Enid Bagnold’sNational Velvet and more recently Jane Smiley’sHorse Heaven.
TM: And, because this is The Millions, I must ask you: what are you reading?
ML: I am currently reading Peter Ho Davies’sThe Fortunes. The novel opens with an account of Ah Ling who hopes to strike gold and ends up working on the railway. Part II follows the life of Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s first Chinese film star. Part III explores the racially motivated killing of Vincent Chin in Detroit in 1982. In part IV we learn how these three are connected as an American couple struggle to adopt a Chinese baby. Davies writes beautiful and dangerous sentences, and I love his timely exploration of issues of race and racism.

And this is very often the case, that it’ll take only moments for me to sense that I’ve found the right next book — when this is happening, in those rare and wonderful moments, I actually feel somewhat physically unwell. It’s like I’m literally being overwhelmed by what I’m reading.

2 comments:

“I’m pursuing any kind of vendetta;”
Pretty sure this should be “I’m not pursuing any kind of vendetta;”

Interesting interview, especially the extent to which the situation remains “live”. Given that, the book seems quite a risk on Lasdun’s part. But the way he describes it as being his only possible response makes a kind of sense.

In truth, I think it is clear that morally, the act of pirating a product is, in fact, the moral equivalent of stealing... although that nagging question of what the person who has been stolen from is missing still lingers.

Ann Beattie has been writing short stories for more than 40 years. For some readers, she remains associated with the Baby Boomer generation and specifically the 1970s when she first started publishing. But her style and approach have changed over the years, and even if she’s not as associated with the zeitgeist as she once was, her output in the 21st century -- which includes both new and selected volumes of short stories, novels, novellas -- demonstrates that she has not slowed down, nor has she abandoned new ideas and approaches.
Beattie’s new book The State We’re In: Maine Stories is a collection of loosely linked short stories about people living in the state, some more permanently than others. We spoke back and forth over e-mail while she was on the road about linked short stories, Maine, and ending a story.
The Millions: Where did the idea for the book start?
Ann Beattie: I never have ideas. I don’t plan or plot. My husband was in Europe on vacation with his brother, and I decided to sit down and start writing and see what happened. The month before, I’d written [the short stories] “Road Movie” in rough draft, and “Missed Calls” in more-or-less final form, so maybe I was also slightly in a Maine state of mind...but if I remember correctly, when I wrote “The Fledgling,” I was just seeing what I could write in the first hour after I sat down. Then I remembered how much fun it can be to write.
TM: Why do you find Maine an interesting fictional space?
AB: I suppose I might feel so much an outsider, or simply so negative about a place that it wouldn’t be something I’d want to visit in fiction, but Maine is like any other place to me. I wasn’t at all trying to define anything about the state. Since I’ve lived here for about 25 years part of the year, of course some things were right there at my fingertips. Had I found the fledgling in the recycling bin in Virginia, I would have set the story there, I guess.
TM: There are a lot of people who will read this book who have never been to Maine and only know the state through Stephen King, Richard Russo, Carolyn Chute, and Murder, She Wrote. Were you thinking of this and playing with that knowledge or expectation?
AB: Yes, would be the short answer. I hear conversations all around me, I know both people who live here 12 months a year and tourists, and the state also gets tons of publicity, so I think I have many perspectives on how people think of Maine. While I do think vaguely of my audience when I write (though I hope it’s never a predictable audience; I really write for myself and a very few other people, initially), I write whatever I’m inclined to write, because a writer shouldn’t outguess or in any way condescend to her audience.
TM: What made this a story collection as opposed to a Robert Altman-esque novel with many central characters–or a Beattie-esque novel like Falling in Place, say?
AB: Good question. But I’ve already written Falling in Place, so wouldn’t want to use that exact structure again. Also, at first the stories seemed more unrelated than they turned out to be. In many cases, I fought the impulse to have more cross-overs or walk-ons, or scenes in which this character meets that character (which would have been easy). I didn’t get to the character I think of as most central, Jocelyn, until I had about half the stories in what became the book. Then her story got longer and longer. If the whole thing had been a seesaw, Jocelyn would have easily tipped the balance and sent the other characters up into the air to dangle. That would have been counter-productive, so I didn’t restrain myself from writing so much about her in first-draft, but afterwards -- inspired by my husband’s helpful thoughts (hi, honey!), I realized it might work well to divide the material and intersperse her ongoing story with other stories that were not inconclusive, but best understood in terms of their stand-alone connotations as separate stories. Is that clear enough? What I mean is, her story was too big to stand alone and not interrupt the book, but I hoped that the little stories orbiting her would work two ways: that hers would comment ultimately on them, and that they would add some perspective, etc. to hers.
TM: Why did you resist having characters appear in other stories. I ask because I suppose that’s an obvious option when writing stories set in the same place. Even in a book like this, do you want each story to stand completely on its own?
AB: One way to answer the question would be that the reason I resist writing related short stories has to do with my writing method, which is not to pre-plan a story. If I knew characters were hovering in the wings that should be incorporated, I’d worry that it would determine, too much, what story I wrote next. That doesn’t seem to me enough of an answer. I’m quite aware that things reappear in my stories, such as Patsy Cline songs. I deliberately take something -- some object -- and see if it looks different, or works differently, from story to story. Like everyone else, I also take the chair in the living room and see if I like it better in the bedroom. That doesn’t exactly answer the question, either. With the disclaimer that there are books of stories in which the characters reappear that I like very much, I tend to be moved by stories in which the writer begins and -- I guess -- in some sense concludes lives. It’s a little like watching someone dance under a strobe light. How you capture what it looks like is the initial difficulty (even sunlight is really no less of a problem), but if you represent the dancer, even if she’s moving through differently colored lights, or waving her arms more than before, then it’s the dance you’re watching, not the dancer. I suppose the argument could be made that that would be just fine. Or the joke: Ah, Beattie’s next collection will be linked stories. I doubt it.
TM: I know that you live there part time, but does Maine feel like home to you?
AB: No. The house in Maine feels more or less like home, but then I go out.
TM: Does that make it easier or harder to write about a place?
AB: I honestly don’t know. I think, in general, it helps me to feel comfortable enough in a place, but not too comfortable.
TM: Do you write and discard -- or at least not publish -- a lot of stories?
AB: I’d say 30 or 40 percent are discarded entirely.
TM: How long did The State We’re In/em> take to write and how does that compare to other collections?AB: Not so long. It’s one summer’s stories, though that says nothing about how they were ordered or what time I took discarding individual stories and making revisions.
TM: How do your stories typically start? Did it change in any way for the stories in this collection?
AB: It did change with this book. I didn’t set out to write a book, just to see if I could write some rather short stories that I hoped would be on some level pretty direct (such as the ones that involve conversations, like “The Stroke” or “Silent Prayer”). It took me a while to realize how much almost all of them were stories about how people tell stories -- whether epistolary (“Missed Calls”), or mostly gossip, or with people trying to write stories but living them instead (“Duff’s Done Enough”). If you look at the book as a collection of women’s voices -- different women, telling stories -- that would seem right to me. That strikes me as more of a common denominator than the state of Maine. As for the first part of the question -- almost everything I write starts with a visual image, even if its position gets rearranged later.
TM: Do you write stories with an ending in mind?
AB: Never.
TM: So how do you know when you’ve reached the end of a story? Because so many of them don’t conclude per se.
AB: To me, using a different way of thinking (a different part of my brain, no doubt), I’ve begun to sense, as a story stretches out, where it is going and what small things are operative (motifs, etc.). I try to allow myself messy rough drafts, but that’s different from having good instincts and eventually guessing, as I write, where a story is headed (though the specifics surprise me all the time). How do I know when I’ve reached the end? When there’s a critical mass I could explain, but since any good story is never just a riddle to be solved, nothing would make me articulate that, except in the vaguest sense, to myself -- functioning as writer first, but thereafter as reader.
TM: In your Paris Review interview you said that when you started writing, there wasn’t another short-story writer you wanted to emulate. Do you see writers now who have followed what you’ve been doing?
AB: No comment. But not unrelated: writers are in dialogue with other writers. Sometimes they’re mimics, rather than originators -- right?